NHTSA Chief To Meet With Mary Barra, Other Detroit Automaker CEOs

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In an ongoing effort to step up personal communication between the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the big three Detroit automakers, NHTSA chief, Mark Rosekind, has called a meeting with Mary Barra and Ford’s CEO Mark Fields. FCA CEO, Sergio Marchionne, will be unavailable.

The meeting is being seen as a critical step in opening up communications between GM and the NHTSA. Rosekind hopes these talks will be a crucial step in advancing safety in vehicles, and has promised to make more frequent trips to discuss the matter with General Motors, Ford and FCA.

“One of the things I’ve emphasized … is that I want to have direct communication. If there are issues, I want to be able to call them or they can call me — that just doing this through headlines for example or reading a press release is not the way for us to talk about a recall issue or a defect,” Rosekind told The Detroit News.

The other topic of discussion will be ensuring a higher recall completion rate for the millions of recalled vehicles in 2014. That includes General Motors’ faulty ignition-switch found in a handful of GM vehicles, where the fault has been linked to 90 deaths directly.

Rosekind previously held an all-day event this past Tuesday with many major automakers, including GM. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers met to discuss and conduct research to improve recall completion rates